1.Police are investigating homophobic messages spray painted on the parking lot of a Canadian high school, a follow-up to hateful online comments dating back to last fall. The graffiti appeared the day after students at St. Anne Catholic High School in the Windsor-Essex Catholic School district wore t-shirts to support LGBT community members, reports The Windsor Star. Administrators promised to act in response, with the school district board expressing its own shock and disgust, according to CTV Windsor.

2.Cosmopolitanhas covered the firing of LGBT church workers, profiling Christina Gambaro and Olivia Reichert who were fired from the teaching positions at Cor Jesu Academy in St. Louis, in 2014. You can read about their incident and more than 40 others by clicking here.

3. Fired gay teacher Lonnie Billard told Buzzfeed he would no longer participate in the Catholic Church, which he called a “bigoted organization, and instead would seek another Christian church with his partner. Billiard was fired from a Charlotte, North Carolina high school in 2014.

4. National Catholic Reporter columnist Heidi Schlumpf listed LGBT issues among the top five things that give her hope in 2015. She writes, in part:

“While there’s still work to be done, the work of past generations is truly paying off. While the institutional church is lagging on this issue, polls find that the majority of lay Catholics, especially younger Catholics, support gay marriage.”

We will not approve any comments that we deem to be pastorally or personally harmful to our readers.

We will not approve any comments that tell people to leave the Catholic Church. Blanket calls for all LGBTQ people and allies to leave the church–either because they are hypocritical to remain or because they are not orthodox enough to be included or for some other reason–do not fit our definition of discussion.We respect individuals’ decisions to leave the Church, so telling their stories about those decisions is permissible.